At an International Defence Exhibition 2012 in Poland, I interviewed, in English, an executive from a Polish arms manufacturing firm. I then transposed this filmed interview in a Dubbing-studio in Montreal, Canada.
Dubbing artist and actor Jean-Luc Montminy (who is the French-Canadian voice for actors including Bruce Willis and Denzel Washington) dubbed the interview into French in collaboration with a studio director and a sound engineer, as would be done for a motion picture production.
I captured this moment of language and discourse deconstruction and reconstruction with my camera. The moment at which an arms manufacturer is given another language and other words by a dubbing artist and the technical infrastructure at a cinema becomes visible here. This process can lead to questions about language and power and their (in)visibility, and also brings in the issue of armed politics in relation to film/the world of cinema. Film and war have had a complex dialectic relationship since the beginning of motion picture history, and are closely connected in terms of the production, the technology and image reception. Looking at these relationships is part of this discussion.
This shift of a documentary to the production site of fiction – the film studio, should allow questioning around the complex issues of political and economic interests on the difficult grounds of arms dealing.
In the exhibition, the video with the dubbing artist is projected onto the wall. The video with the interview is set at the same height and size on a flat screen that is integrated into the wall. The sound comes through the headphones.

Filmed in Cinélume film studio in Montreal. In co-production with “Vidéographe” Montreal and “La Bande Vidéo” Quebec.